How Makers of Web Browsers Include CAs in Their Products

Published: 2011-09-08. Last Updated: 2011-09-08 04:41:43 UTC
by Lenny Zeltser (Version: 1)
3 comment(s)

Since Certificate Authorities (CAs) are on many people's minds nowadays, we asked @sans_isc followers on Twitter:

How do browser makers (Microsoft, Mozilla, Google, Opera) decide which CAs to put into the product?

Several individuals kindly provided us with pointers to the vendors' documentation that describe their processes for including CAs in web browser distributions:

If you have a pointer to Google Chrome certificate-inclusion practices, please let us know.

-- Lenny

Lenny Zeltser focuses on safeguarding customers' IT operations at Radiant Systems. He also teaches how to analyze and combat malware at SANS Institute. Lenny is active on Twitter and writes a daily security blog.

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Comments

There was this nice spoof recently: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=647959
We need to get all of the browsers to include Convergence to replace the broken CA system. http://convergence.io/
It seems Google Chrome uses the list of trusted CAs available on the underlying operating system, such as Microsoft or Apple.

On Linux, Chromium uses the NSS Shared DB (https://code.google.com/p/chromium/wiki/LinuxCertManagement and http://wiki.cacert.org/FAQ/BrowserClients?action=show&redirect=BrowserClients#Linux).

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